Cleaning out my sister’s home, family roles, and other sticky attachments

My sister Rhonda recently decided to sell her house outside of Denver. It was filled with furniture and belongings that she and her family had collected over decades. Getting her house ready to put on the market was a lot for one person, so our brother, Dean, his wife, Leslie, and I flew in to help Rhonda pare down her stuff and get her house staged for sale.

I adore my sister. She is eight years older than me and always served as my protector. She let me crawl into her bed at night when I was afraid of the dark. She introduced me to Seventeen magazine, The Brothers Karamazov, The Brothers Grimm, and The Preppy Handbook. She cooked from The Silver Palate, which is where I learned that prunes really are great if you know what to do with them. She made her own raku pottery. And, after a lifetime of dismissing sports, she is now the golf champion at her club.

She is also a sentimentalist, and when your interests span cooking, housewares, books, and art, you end up with a lot of possessions. In drawers. In hall closets. In the closets of spare rooms. In the garage. And in your car.

On day 2 of The Great Clean Out, Rhonda rounded a corner and saw Dean, Leslie, and me plotting our intervention. When she saw our guilty looks, she laughed. She knew what was coming.

Leslie suggested we gather collections of objects and have Rhonda select a smaller group to keep. For instance, if she had 15 trays (and she did), she could keep five. And so on. The rest would be donated to a Veterans’ organization.

Our attachment to possessions is wildly powerful. They possess us. This is particularly true for Rhonda; I could see that letting go of her things was tantamount to letting go of parts of her life. It was almost physically painful. With a few tears but a determined smile, she soldiered through. By the time we left, we’d filled a dumpster with trash and the Veterans’ group had hauled away a truckload that included chairs, golf clubs, books, deviled egg plates, and wrapping paper. (The teamwork paid off: the house sold in three days.)